Norcia
Famous for its truffles, Norcia is divided into districts (guaite) and with a seventeenth-nineteenth-century urban fabric, Norcia boasts a large historical-artistic heritage.
From a geographical and naturalistic point of view, Norcia is located at the junction point of two very different but contiguous landscape realities: the Valnerina, or the district of the narrow river valley carved by the Nera river and its tributaries, with its steep mountain slopes covered with deciduous vegetation, and the Sibillini Mountains, the mountainous area of tectonic origin characterized by peaks capable of reaching and exceeding 2000 meters in height, with grassy slopes or covered by beech woods, rounded by the glacial and wind action, inside the which open vast karst plateaus exploited for grazing cattle and flocks and rich in mountain floral species including mugwort, anemone, gentian and martagon lily.
The woods surrounding the valley are populated by roe deer, wild cats and squirrels while in past years, thanks to repopulation works, the wild boar has also been able to make its reappearance.
In the high mountain beech forests there are some small herds of Apennine wolf, which live however in difficult balance with the human presence linked above all to pastoralism, widely practiced in the area. The golden eagle is rare but present, while the species of the peregrine falcon, the red woodpecker and the wallcreeper are relatively frequent.
An endemic species of crustacean lives in the waters of Lake Pilato, a small lake of varying levels, fed by melting snow, located in a glacial basin near the top of Mount Carrier: the Marchesoni Chirocefalo.
The plateau of Castelluccio di Norcia to the north. On the right, Mount Carrier and the Sibillini Mountains chain
Karst phenomena are very frequent and in the vicinity of the urban center, close to the city walls, they give rise to resurgences locally called marcite, or areas in which water, collected and redistributed through a rational system of canals, continuously floods and controlled for long periods of the year large areas of land, allowing the harvest of abundant hay.
In the high mountains, the phenomenon is manifested by the presence of numerous sinkholes which, especially in the southern part of the Castelluccio plateau, are clearly visible by extension and morphology.
The Castelluccio Plateau is made up of a system of different glacial basins that emptied in the geological era following a series of tectonic upheavals. The plateau develops on a North-South direction for a total length of about 20 km and takes its name from the small town that occupies one of its marginal limestone peaks. Pian Grande represents the largest plateau (about 15 square km): to it are added the smaller plateaus (Pian Piccolo, Pian Perduto, Quarto San Lorenzo and Pian dei Pantani). In late spring the plateau is the scene of a particular natural phenomenon called Flowering and precisely due to the simultaneous flowering of dozens of different floral species that give rise to a multicolored carpet that covers the entire valley.